By: Anonymous

Anonymous
Sun, 05 Apr 2015 14:11:11 +0000

You have not dealt with the significant issue
I am disappointed with this analysis, because you seem to have been unable to engage with the obvious contradictions of your position. You need not, of course, recognize them as contradictions to acknowledge them as worthy of clarification – one would think, though, with you being such a vehement critic of Rothbard, you would have ensured you did not make the same mistakes.

You tell us that anarcho-Capitalism is as much as contradiction as ‘anarcho-statism’, but exactly that should be said of anarcho-Socialism. If you think that claiming jurisdiction or authority of an area or think is inherently hierarchical and, as such, wrong, then how can you possibly defend anybody ever taking or using anything? Is it not that, to till the earth, or to kill an animal, or to sleep or live anywhere, in some considerable sense, to claim jurisdiction of it?

If you reject private property, then you must surely offer public property to replace it, or claim that there is no property at all, which is plainly just to misunderstand what property is.

More importantly, though, you seem to conflate two different types of freedom. You compare a free market society to being trapped in a hole, in which there is only one option – you ask if someone in that situation is really ‘free’? But as determinists (and I assume you are one), we can only accept that all our lives we only have one option, only one series of events which can possibly take place. This does not mean that we are never free, and therefore just because someone has only one option (for example, only one job opportunity), it cannot mean that they are unfree, unless you mean by some other standard of freedom. One example might be what seems to be Rothbard’s standard, namely the absence of coercion. It does follow from this that your man in a hole is indeed free, in some considerable sense. But to see that this is not a problem is only to recognize that metaphysical freedom and political or individual freedom are two different things.

Indeed, it would surely follow from this idea of freedom as, rather than the absence of coercion, a pleasant life, that we should institute some absolutist authoritarian state, which sacrifices freedom (an illusion anyway), for enforced economic or personal well-being.

The only basis from which you could defend your position would be by arguing, first of all, that there was some other, consistent rationalist theory of property, and secondly that freedom can somehow be, not the absence of coercion, but the presence of a pleasurable and comfortable life in which one does whatever one wants. I doubt either of these goals is achievable.

I do not agree with Rothbard, but nor do I think you’ve given his theory anything like a fair airing. Your central point is that he is a so-called ‘Anarcho-Statist’, but what could be more Statist than the coercive acquisition of property by an aggressive multitude?